Departures

By Reviewed by Paul Byrnes

YOU have to love the ways that traditional and modern culture entwine in Japan. Departures is a film about the rituals of death from a director who started in porn and a writer who worked on Iron Chef, that wacky TV show about competitive cooking. Neither career path is unusual in Japanese cinema. And yet their film is so imbued with traditional attitudes and values that it makes you wonder how deep the layer of modernity really is.

A cherry blossom in such a film is inevitable. It's like code to a Japanese audience. The cherry blossom comes in spring to remind the Japanese that life is renewed after winter, then it dies quickly. In appreciating that transience, the Japanese seek to define themselves. It's easy, then, to believe they take their death rituals seriously, although one of the surprises of Departures is that it's funny – at least initially.

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The second half is doggedly sad and sentimental. Altogether, that's a powerful combination. That may be part of why it won the 2009 Oscar for best foreign-language film, although I'd like to think it was because of the movie's great humanity.

Daigo Kobayashi (the handsome Masahiro Motoki, a former teen idol) loses his job as a cellist in Tokyo after the orchestra folds. He sells his expensive cello, aware he'll never make the top grade, and moves back to his home town. His wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), cheerfully agrees to live in the traditional house left by his mother, who died two years earlier.

Daigo sees a job advert for an agency working with "departures". The boss, Mr Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), hires him instantly, without looking at his résumé. Only then does the docile Daigo learn that he's not working for a travel agent but an "encoffinator". The ad should have said "the departed", the boss explains, not "departures".

Daigo's first job is to play the corpse in a DVD made "for the trade". Sasaki explains the procedures to camera as he washes the body. He then dresses the increasingly disquieted "corpse" while keeping it covered. "Take great care that the relatives do not see the naked body," Mr Sasaki says to camera, deadpan, after he plugs the orifices with wads of cotton.

This is actually the second time we have seen the procedure – so we know what is happening. The opening scene shows Daigo and his boss attending the rural home of a beautiful young woman who has committed "suicide by charcoal", meaning that she has breathed the fumes in a closed room. The grieving relatives watch as Daigo goes to work solo for the first time. Mr Sasaki kneels beside him as he enfolds the woman's hands on top of a quilt. He begins to cleanse the body with a sterile cloth, moving gently under the quilt with infinite care and respect. He stops abruptly as he reaches the lower parts of the body. He withdraws the cloth and whispers to the boss. With great delicacy, the boss inquires of the parents if the deceased is to be dressed in women's or men's clothes.

The ritual of preparing the body is the movie's central dramatic piece. We see it many times and each time we understand a little more. The process is incredibly intricate and poised, like a tea ceremony for the dead. The grieving relatives are expected to watch as the loved one is made ready for the "final journey".

The job used to be done by the family in olden times, explains the boss's assistant, a former bar girl (Kimiko Yo). "Casketing" is now a niche market because the funeral directors don't want to do it. There are strong taboos about touching the dead, as we begin to see when Daigo's wife finds out what his new job entails. She demands that he get a respectable job. The problem is that Daigo has begun to see the beauty in what he does. He has learnt how to make the dead look their best and he has seen how his work helps the families to say goodbye. "You were born to do this job," the boss tells him.

Departures is made in a commercial, rather than strictly art-house, style. It uses voice-over narration when none is really necessary.

Daigo plays his cello sitting on a bank in the middle of rice fields in a montage of sadness to ramp up the sentiment. At the same time, much is kept understated, such as the way the director Takita uses the changing seasons to suggest delicate emotional changes. Takita eventually pushes the emotions too hard but by then I had lost all resistance. It's a beautiful film but take two hankies.